Robots Will Replace Us All

We have to decouple labor from our identity, for one. It's time to retire the idea that one's value as a person comes from the number of hours one surrenders to capitalism. Housing, food, and health care need to be considered basic rights and available to everyone. Universal basic income needs to become a thing. The alternative is a dystopian nightmare society.

Circuitmike

It's inevitable that we require more education out of the every-day American. But, we have a long way to go before the Robot Revolution. There are low-moderate education jobs in the education sector itself, which is exploding and will continue to provide massive amounts of jobs in the future. There's jobs and will always continue to be jobs in Healthcare, business services, sales, construction sectors, etc. Nearly a million people in the USA work in some way related to automotive manufacturing. An industry that has been laser focused on automation for 100 years

Seymore Butts

I guess the boston robotics guy would tell you that only 10% as many technicians are needed as manual workers, so it's not unreasonable to find 10% with aptitude in the redundant workers. Sucks for 90% of the workers, though.

adrian

A bit of some illogic here as you mention ‘a 150% turnover but where do the 2 million go when robots finally take over.?’ The ‘burnt out’ turnovers are going somewhere at this time. Right? Perhaps they have learned to go back to school or?

Donald J Arndt

The analogue Fran can NEVER be replaced!!!

Rick Lett

This has been keeping me up at night for a while.

Dan Elleson

universal basic income...saddly

Labor for almost no cost could also cause massive deflation (or at least a lot of pressure that way).

It’s a natural process. And this process is generated by the now actively promoted consumption cult (you don’t have to do anything - just pay and get). This, in principle, applies not only to the US, but to the whole world. This natural process is already leading to the emergence of new professions that no one had ever thought of. The key to solving this problem lies in the active self-development of the individual.

I had the same completely astounded reaction to that Boston Dynamics guy when questioned about jobs lost to robots. I thought immediately the same thing. This "new job field creation" in maintaining, or working with technology would grow after their robots removed their "simple" jobs. How are employees that may not have even graduated high school expected to just instantly "transform" into code writers and robot technicians? Unless I've missed it, I don't have a USB port on my head for uploading massive amounts of knowledge instantly. And I'm pretty sure knowledge doesn't descend from florescent lighting. What if you could economically replace all postal delivery employees? How many USPS workers could be retained in some completely alien world where they are suddenly locked into a seat within a cube in some massive building full of computers? No longer walking, but now just sitting all day waiting for the next technology wave to eliminate their desk jobs? That's just torture for someone who spent their lives walking. I would love to think that every human being has the potential to easily learn and grow at any age. Many humans get a real sense of satisfaction in physically "building things" with their hands. I know I do. I saw a movie once where an older office worker was told he was being downsized and the HR rep said something to the effect of "Look at it this way... you could have been digging ditches for the past 40 years". The employee immediately responded with "Yeah, well at least I'd have some holes in the ground to show for it!" I'm in my mid 50s working a highly technical job. But I know for a fact that I no longer learn as fast and I deal with changes less effectively as I get older. I'm not physically able to "dig ditches" any longer. Robots are probably digging them today anyway. Until that Boston Robotics guy can take a random employee off an Amazon warehouse sorting line and train them quickly in a highly technical job, his answer to the jobs lost, yet opportunity created, just doesn't pass the stink test! I'm sure it's great fun to have a building full of smart people with 3 advanced degrees each (I'm not impressed by "degrees") that are allowed to spend limitless money building and breaking robots. But I don't see someone even socially "fitting in" with a bunch of young people telling them what to do with technology they were never exposed to before. Until every human in the world is presented with the same opportunities to learn and grow with technology, I can't see a bright future for humanity. I watch YouTube videos on manufacturing things like electric motors, or red hot stamped steel parts, in Asian countries and there is not a glove or pair of safety glasses in sight. Cheap human labor exploitation is always going to be cheaper than robots. Is that really the global future we want?

Matt Wietlispach

Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Player Piano" about this subject way back in 1952. "What are we going to do with all these useless people?"

Kenneth A. Weeks

I'm going to stick with the analog Fran!

David Peaker